Air Force
Vice Chief of Staff Gen. T. Michael Moseley spoke to the Corps of Cadets
today on leadership in McAlister Field House as part of the Greater Issues
Series.

“Some
of America’s greats have spoken here in front of the Military College
of South Carolina, but I’m not sure any of them had the challenge
that I’ve got today of being the key element standing between the
Corps and spring break,” Moseley joked to the audience.

A native
of Texas, Moseley assists the Air Force chief of staff in organizing,
training and equipping more than 710,000 active-duty, Guard, Reserve,
and civilian airmen serving the United States and overseas. He leads the
Air Staff and ensures force readiness and continued innovation.

Moseley,
who has served as the combined forces air component commander for the
country’s last two military campaigns, shared two stories that he
felt demonstrated the quality of people serving in the armed forces and
the effects of the country’s actions in Iraq.

While flying
outside of Baghdad on board a KC-135 tanker, Moseley met a 22-year-old
woman, who served as the aircraft’s boom operator—someone
who refuels the tanks of fighter planes in mid-flight. When an F-16 fighter
returned with one GUB12 (a bomb with guidance support system), she radioed
the pilot, asking him why he still had a bomb on his plane.

When the
pilot responded that he was running out of gas, the young woman told him,
“‘I’m going to give you that gas. Get back out there,
and drop that bomb.’ ”

“And
I share that with you,” Moseley said, “because here’s
a kid who, five days after she became mission ready or combat capable
in her weapon system, deployed, and in 45 days flew 47 combat missions
and wasn’t flinching on this at all. She refueled Marine aircraft,
Navy aircraft, British aircraft, Australian aircraft, U.S. Air Force aircraft,
Guard aircraft, Reserve aircraft, and at the end of all this, she said,
‘Sir, I couldn’t imagine a place I’d rather be. I grew
up in an Air Force family, I grew up doing this, I intend to do this for
as long as I can.’ With people like that, and with people like you,
we can’t go wrong.”

Moseley
told another story about an Air Force nurse who was treating civilians
at an Army medical unit in Northern Iraq when an elderly gentleman with
a young girl approached her. Talking through a translator, the man told
the nurse that he wanted her to look at his granddaughter’s eyes.
The nurse told him that she was not a doctor but would do whatever she
could to help out until a doctor could see the little girl, but the man
still insisted. “ ‘No, I want you to look at her eyes. . .
I want you to look into my granddaughter’s eyes because today she
has the look of freedom.’ ”

Concluding
his speech, Moseley said, “Today little girls can go to school in
Afghanistan. Today there’s a constitution being worked out in Afghanistan,
and women participated in that. And today little boys can go to school
in Afghanistan and at the age of 10 or 11, they are not handed rifles.
And things are better in Iraq today also. Schools are open. Clinics, hospitals
are open The cities are open. There’s power. Public utilities are
beginning to come back. And last week, the petroleum exporting capacity
of 2.5 or 2.7 million barrels a day passed over pre-hostility levels.
And because of people like you, people in Iraq and Afghanistan now are
not living under a very heavy dark wet oppressive blanket.”

Since it
was established in 1954, the Greater Issues Series has brought presidents,
heads of state, scholars, diplomats, journalists and distinguished business
and military leaders to Charleston and The Citadel.